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For Pentecost, when the Church remembers how the followers of Jesus Christ first received the Holy Spirit, some of the best music is by Thomas Tallis (c<\/em>1505-1585), the most admired English composer of the sixteenth century. He managed to pursue his long career as an organist, singer, composer and Gentleman of the Chapel Royal through dangerous times, apparently with contentment: his epitaph includes the lines As he did live, so also did he die, \/ In mild and quiet sort (O! Happy man!)<\/em>. Tallis has the unique distinction, while remaining a Catholic himself, of having served four Tudor monarchs who were wont to change the rules of religion and execute those who opposed them: Henry VIII, who in the 1530s defied the Pope and made himself the head of the English Church; Edward VI, whose reign (1547-53) imposed the Anglican Church as a strict form of Protestantism; Mary I (‘Bloody Mary’), who in 1553-8 reinstated Roman Catholicism in England by force; and Elizabeth I, who restored the Anglican Church but proved — fortunately for Tallis, William Byrd and many others — to be far more tolerant of personal choice in religious devotion than her brother Edward and sister Mary had been. These three Pentecost pieces alone reflect some of those great upheavals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n